Stronger Plants, Stronger Science, and Stronger Communication
Often, risks of transgenic plants are made to appear larger than they are, and often risks aren’t put into context. There are always exceptions, of course. Sometimes, risks are underevaluated inappropriately. Thankfully, the USDA’s deregulation process has ways to involve stakeholders such that there are safety controls. It’s not a perfect system, but it seems to…
Greenpeace has a campaign to convince Nestlé to ban genetically modified crops from their products in India. They have an auto-letter set up that has been sent 25,808 times (as of 2:40pm Central time). That includes my letter which I sent through their site urging Nestlé to stand up against fearmongering. I’ve since sent a…
The USDA Report by Cyndi Barmore, The Unexplored Potential of Organic-Biotech Production, has recently been pulled from the USDA website. This is the USDA’s explanation: “On May 26, 2009, the Foreign Agricultural Service (FAS) posted a Global Agriculture Information Network (GAIN) report titled, “The Unexplored Potential of Organic-Biotech Production.” This report should have been accompanied…
I just upgraded Biofortified’s WordPress system, and it appears that the Features Gallery employed by the site theme is not functioning. I know how to fix it, but that will involve replacing the theme with a rewritten one. This might take me about a week to write it and test it out. In the meantime,…
It seems that now there is a lot more time for people to register and vote in the Changemakers “GMO Risk or Rescue” contest, or enter for that matter. Today the deadline for entering the contest has been extended by 40 days to October 21st, and voting will continue until the 28th of October. It…
In Looking for the Truth, I did a point by point critical analysis of Organic Agriculture Beats Biotech at its Own Game by Timothy LaSalle, CEO of the Rodale Institute. I gave Dr. LaSalle credit for being a smart person who allows his ideology to cloud his judgement.
After reading Why GMO Foods Have Failed at Producing Healthy Food for More People, I don’t think I should have given him that much credit. I already covered most of his points in my previous post, but he makes some new points in this article that are, frankly, reminiscent of the scaremongering lies promoted by the Republican party about imaginary death panels.
If you’re not reading Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog yet, you really should start. Luigi and Jeremy write about seed banks, traditional agriculture, and tasty native plants, just to name a few. And they post a lot. I’m mentioning them now because of GURT big mess, posted by Jeremy. In this post, he says that activists who…
This afternoon, I polished off my entry into the Ashoka Changemakers GMO “Risk or Rescue” contest, with minutes to go before the deadline. I was going to submit my entry last night, but what I had written on the site’s system disappeared when I tried to publish it. So I had to start all over,…
In my post What’s in a label?, I argued against mandatory labeling for specific details of crops, farming methods, etc. that aren’t health related, such as Kosher, “contains animal-derived ingredients”, GMO, and rBST. However, I argue in favor of any additional labels that a grower or manufacturer might want to provide, even when they go against science and may do more harm than good. In a free market, so as long as claims are true, additional labels should be allowed.
A few weeks ago, I got a message from the folks at Ashoka Changemakers – earlier this summer they started a contest, one of many that they host, to spur some original thinking to help see our society out of the debate over genetically engineered crops. It is called GMO Risk or Rescue? Helping Consumers…
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